Sunday, July 05, 2015

Mexico City - “People don’t know what ‘fracking’ is and there is
little concern about the issue because it’s not visible yet,” said
Gabino Vicente, a delegate of one of the municipalities in southern
Mexico where exploration for unconventional gas is forging ahead.
Vicente is a local representative of the community of Santa Úrsula in
the municipality of San Juan Bautista Tuxtepec, some 450 km south of
Mexico City in the state of Oaxaca, where – he told IPS – “fracking is
sort of a hidden issue; there’s a great lack of information about it.”

Tuxtepec, population 155,000, and another Oaxaca municipality, Loma Bonita, form part of the project Papaloapan B with
seven municipalities in the neighbouring state of Veracruz. The shale
gas and oil exploration project was launched by Mexico’s state oil
company, Pemex, in 2011.
Papaloapan B, backed by the governmental National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH),
covers 12,805 square kilometres and is seeking to tap into shale gas
reserves estimated at between 166 and 379 billion barrels of oil
equivalent.
The project will involve 24 geological studies and the exploratory
drilling of 120 wells, for a total investment of 680 million dollars.

But people in Tuxtepec have not been informed about the project. “We
don’t know a thing about it,” said Vicente, whose rural community has a
population of 1,000. “Normally, companies do not provide information to
the local communities; they arrange things in secret or with some owners
of land by means of deceit, taking advantage of the lack of money in
the area.”
Shale, a common type of sedimentary rock made up largely of compacted
silt and clay, is an unconventional source of natural gas. The gas
trapped in shale formations is recovered by hydraulic fracturing or
fracking.

Fracking involves the massive pumping of water, chemicals and sand at
high pressure into the well, a technique that opens and extends
fractures in the shale rock deep below the surface, to release the
natural gas on a massive scale.
The process generates large amounts of waste liquids containing
dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment before
disposal, environmental organisations like Greenpeace warn.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA)
puts Mexico in sixth place in the world for technically recoverable
shale gas, behind China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and
Canada, based on the analysis of 137 deposits in 42 countries. And
Mexico is in eighth position for technically recoverable shale oil
reserves.

A
map of the areas of current or future fracking activity in Mexico,
which local communities say they have no information about. (Image:
Courtesy of Cartocrítica)more here Oklahoma City, Oklahoma — Historically speaking, Oklahoma used to be a
place where almost no palpable earthquakes happened at all — but
hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. “fracking” has changed all that now.
Between the dates June 17 and June 24, 2015, Oklahoma was jolted by
35 earthquakes greater than magnitude 3.0 due to fracking and fracking
wastewater injection activities the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS) has
confirmed — this, in a state that experienced less than two such quakes
per year before 2009.
The sketchy episode comes only two months on the heels of the
implementation of new regulations in the state that prevent operators
and waste disposers from injecting wastewater “below the state’s deepest
rock formation, believed to be one of the main causes of the quakes,”
Reuters reported.

The Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC) regulates all oil and gas
activities in the state, and had a strong and vocal response to last
weeks unprecedented episode.
Matt Skinner, a spokesman for the OCC told Reuters, “There’s
been a huge increase. That’s a game-changer,” insinuating that OCC may
need to implement even more rules in an effort to deescalate the
frequency and force of the tremors — an shaky situation that has many
residents in Oklahoma downright concerned.
Homes have been rattled and damaged to the tune of tens of thousands
of dollars, and worrying regulators is the stark fact that some of last
weeks quakes stretched beyond rural oilfield areas and shook homes and
businesses along fault-lines in metropolitan, and heavily populated
Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma's Manmade, Industry-Created, Seismic Debacle
To be clear, the activity of fracking, or basically blowing up rocks
underground to release oil and gas, in and of itself can and does cause
earthquakes. However, it is the underground injection of fracking
flow-back water, or wastewater that is blamed for most of the simply
massive increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma.
When briny, chemically-loaded fracking flow-back water is pumped back
underground it has a tendency to perniciously pressurize the geological
formations, causing things to slip, shift or give way. In Oklahoma, the
problem has become chronic.

Decades upon decades of exploitation have left Oklahoma’s oilfields
saturated with water, and the sheer volume of wastewater injection wells
is making it very difficult for experts and regulators to zero out
culprit wells that might be upsetting faults.
In a section titled, "Water-Logged Oil Fields" Reuters reporter Yeganeh Torbati, in her article on the subject, wrote:

To be sure, Oklahoma faces a different set of challenges from other
states. It is crisscrossed with fault lines, many of which were unmapped
before the quakes began to get notice.
Some of Oklahoma’s most active oil fields are also its most
water-logged, such as the Mississippi Lime formation, where drillers
recover, on average, more than seven barrels of water for every barrel
of oil, according to a study by Kyle Murray, a hydrogeologist at the
Oklahoma Geological Survey.

Oklahoma is home to a staggering 3,200 saltwater injection wells —
many of which are in areas where the water-to-oil ratio is very poor.
Unlike situations in Kansas and other states where particular injection
wells have been definitively linked to seismic events, in Oklahoma, the
situation is complex, and regulators have had limited, if any success
pinning specific wells to corresponding seismic events.

To add fuel to the water-logged fracking fire, “waterflooding“, is
yet another “secondary recovery technique” rarely discussed in the
media, wherein millions upon millions of gallons of water are pumped
underground to re-pressurize entire oilfields that have been deflated to
a point of low productivity. Waterfloods have been deployed widely in
Oklahoma and are also surely contributing to underground formational
movements.
With the escalating and chronic situation in Oklahoma’s watery
oilfields, and the strong words coming from OCC regarding last week’s
epic series of seismic events, onlookers are wondering what the agency’s
next move will be toward cracking down on industry-caused quakes — and
if legislation will soon be necessary to get regulators regulating, in a
scene that is now reaching crisis levels for citizens and the oil
industry alike.

In Landmark Admission, State of Oklahoma Acknowledges Fracking the Culprit
Just two months back, on April 21, 2015, “after years of official
skepticism,” the Sooner State finally accepted that “billions of barrels
of wastewater from oil and gas wells,” were officially to blame for the
marked and massive increase in seismic activity, reported the New York Times.more here